Fatih Akä±Nâ•Žs the Edge of Heaven
UC Berkeley TRANSIT Title Criss-Crossing in Global Space and Time: Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven (2007) Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28x3x9r0 Journal TRANSIT, 5(1) Author Mennel, Barbara Publication Date 2009 DOI 10.5070/T751009745 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Turkish-German Cinema between the National and the Transnational During the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the children of the so-called Turkish “guest workers” exploded onto the German film landscape. By then “guest worker” had become an outdated term from the vocabulary of the West German government’s recruitment program from the late 1950s to the early 1970s addressing the labor shortage produced by the “economic miracle” and exacerbated by the closing of the “Iron Curtain” that prevented labor migration from East to West. These films ushered a new minority subject onto the silver screen: young, self-confident, outspoken, multi-ethnic, and self-proclaimed German. Gone was the iconic image of the lone, suffering, and silent foreign worker of famed director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s exemplary film Ali: Fear Eats Soul ( Angst essen Seele auf , 1974). Film directors Buket Alaku ş, Fatih Akın, Thomas Arslan, Aysun Bademsoy, Seyhan Derin, Ay şe Polat, Yüksel Yavuz, and Turkish director Kutlu ğ Ataman made films that marked, according to Deniz Göktürk, the shift from a “cinema of duty” to the “pleasures of hybridity” (1999). What was then an emerging generation of filmmakers on the margin of German society has since become an integral part of German national cinema, out of which Fatih Akın—the director of The Edge of Heaven ( Auf der anderen Seite , 2007)—has emerged as the nationally and internationally most successful director.
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